PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE

One of the most practical applications of IoT is to forecast the remaining useful life of devices and assets and to get them repaired or replaced before they fail and create costly downtimes for an organization.

In a true-life example of this kind of implementation, Colgate-Palmolive, the US-based FMCG giant utilized a preventive maintenance solution that helped optimize its manufacturing capability. The solution’s ability to determine anomalies alerted the company in time which eventually helped it prevent over 200 hours of downtime and potential output loss of over 2.8 million tubes of toothpaste - one of the company’s flagship products.

QUALITY CONTROL AND MANAGEMENT

In IoT-based quality control and management, an organisation would employ IoT sensor data to observe quality issues that happen in real-time operations.

The value brought by such a system has been highlighted in the words of Martin Hilt, an innovation and digitalization officer at BMW, the automobile giant. Hilt described how the IoT based quality control and management system they used was able to quickly point out if any environmental parameters in their manufacturing process were not right at any stage by utilizing a copious amount of data, collected and analysed in real-time.

VEHICLE FLEET MANAGEMENT

Tracking and tracing vehicles, or vehicle fleet management, is one of the most popular use cases of IoT in supply chain at the moment.

Professional fleet management solutions using IoT leverage cellular networks and sometimes even low-cost satellite technology to efficiently track vehicle fleets in real-time for organisations.

Moreover, as Suzy Verachten, project leader for Lineas (European Rail Freight operator), puts it, solutions of this nature provide not just tracking of their wagons in real-time, but also provide information on which routes can be optimized, and potential areas where customers can save costs.

PROCESS AUTOMATION

IoT based process automation eliminates the need for manual operational processes or those that relied on outdated industrial setu and introduces state-of-art hardware and software that modernises existing setups while bringing in a level of flexibility and agility previously unknown. This flexibility also helps organisations adapt much quicker to rapidly changing customer needs.

The IoT use case adoption report, 2021, quotes a CIO of a food and beverages corporation that used IoT based process automation. As per this CIO, the introduction of IoT based process automation reduced numerous paper-based processes that subsequently reduced errors, and labour costs, and provided better real-time access to data.